Randy Connolly Blog

As the title suggests, applications for our new Bachelor of Computer Information Systems degree (4 year) have been quite encouraging. Compared to this time last year, we have received over 60% more applications from prospective students. This improvement could be due to three reasons:

1. prospective students want a four year credential
2. prospective students like the curriculum in the new degree
3. renewed interest in computer fields after six or seven lean years.

However, given that applications for our computer science university transfer program have not improved, many of us think it is more likely that the first two reasons explain the massive increase.

Teaching, Work

Every September in the first week of classes we have an orientation day for our first year students. One of the highlights of the day is a presentation that I and my colleague Mark Schroeder give on how to achieve success as an undergraduate. Rather than make the presentation all preachy, we decided to have a bit of fun. Instead of calling it 19 Ways to Succeed, we called it 19 Ways to Fail Your Courses. This year, I gave it the same treatment that I gave to my other presentations shown in my blog. If you are interested in using this presentation, just send me an email and I’ll send you the PowerPoint file.

[View with PicLens]

Presentations, Teaching

Today we received news that Doug Horner, Minister of Advanced Education and Technology for the Alberta government has received the recommendation of the Campus Alberta Quality Council and has approved our proposal to offer a bachelor of Computer Information Systems starting September 2009. We now have to go through the process of getting the degree approved by the college’s General Faculty Council.

As the coordinator for our program, I have been heavily involved with the development of the curriculum for this degree. The new degree is mainly based on the ACM IT model curriculum.

Teaching, Work

One of the problems that our department has struggled with over the past seven or eight years is the massive decline in student enrolments in our Computer Information Systems applied degreee and our Computer Science university transfer program. Since the height of the dot com boom in 2000, are numbers have declined by about 75%, or about 50% in comparision to our pre-boom numbers of the mid 1990s. One of the consequences of this drop in student numbers is that we’ve had to make our first-year courses easier in order to maintain enough numbers to make a viable third-year cohort.

The Information and Communications Technology Council of Canada has recently released a report which describes and assesses these recent trends in computer science in Canadian universities and finds that a similar drop occurred at pretty much every college and university in Canada. The report examines five frequently-suggested explanations for this decline: public perceptions surrounding the dotcom bubble burst in 2000-2002, and parental and student perceptions about likely employment opportunities; public perceptions and lack of understanding about the field of computer science as it is today; the failure of many university computer science programs to adapt to changed circumstances; the ubiquity of computers, so that general purpose computing is now, literally, commonplace; and deficiencies in the high-school environments in the preparation of students for IT education and careers.

You can view this report youself: Outlook on IT enrolments.pdf (4.49 mb)

Teaching, Work

I recently gave a talk to students at Western Canada High School about careers in computing. Like most IT-related programs, our Computer Information Systems applied degree has seen a massive decrease in numbers since 2001. These low enrollments have never really picked up, even though the job market for our graduates in Calgary is phenomenal. I put together this presentation in the hopes of attracting a few more students into our program.

I tried a new approach with this presentation. I wanted to make it visually more punchy and not look like the typical PowerPoint presentation. I’ve included a few captures of some sample slides from the presentation.

[View with PicLens]

The complete presentation is available below. You are free to use it, but please do not re-distribute it or re-post it.

high school session 2007 march.pdf (2.00 mb)

Presentations, Teaching